Climate Scientist Sues Over Jerry Sandusky Comparison

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Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann has
filed a lawsuit against The National Review and The Competitive
Enterprise Institute for articles that compared him to convicted
child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Mann's lawsuit concerns two blog posts. The first appeared July
13 on openmarket.org, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI), a nonprofit that promotes free enterprise and
limited government. In the post, author Rand Simberg wrote that
Mann manipulated data in creating his famous " hockey-stick
graph," which shows global temperatures rising sharply with
increased carbon-dioxide output by humans.

"Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,"
Simberg wrote, referring to the Penn State football coach now
imprisoned for child sex abuse, "except that instead of molesting
children, he has molested and tortured data."

Nine investigations of Mann's work, including one by the
Environmental Protection Agency and another by the National
Science Foundation, have found no evidence of academic fraud.

The CEI removed the references to Sandusky in the original blog
post several days after publication, but not before the "The
Corner," the blog of the National Review Online,
picked up the quote in full and repeated the accusations.
Mann and his lawyers filed suit against both organizations on
Monday (Oct. 22) in the Superior Court of the District of
Columbia.

To win the suit, Mann's lawyers will have to show that the
statements made by the CEI and National Review were harmful,
false and made with the malicious intent to injure Mann. They'll
also have to show that the organizations should have known the
statements were false but published them anyway. [ How
Climate Science Became Politicized ]

"We do not believe he will succeed," said Sam Kazman, the general
council attorney for CEI. "Mr. Mann is a very prominent person in
a highly controversial issue involving both science and politics,
and I would have thought by now he'd be accustomed to rhetoric
that can be quite heated." (Mann is typically referred to as a
"Dr." since he has a doctoral degree.)

On his website, Mark Steyn, the author of the National Review
blog post, wrote, "I'll have more to say about this when I stop
laughing."

Mann said he was motivated to file the suit by years of similar
accusations.

"There is a larger context for this latest development, namely
the onslaught of dishonest and libelous attacks that climate
scientists have endured for years by dishonest front groups
seeking to discredit the case for concern over climate change,"
Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Climate-change belief has become
increasingly polarized in the last decade. According to
long-running surveys by Yale University researchers, in 2003 only
7 percent of Americans called climate change a "hoax" or a
"scam." By 2010, 23 percent were using those terms to describe
climate change, indicating an increasing perception of
intentional wrongdoing by scientists.

Some of the politicization dates back to the polarizing Clinton
era, said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project
on Climate Change Communication. After Al Gore took on the role
of environmental advocate with his 2006 documentary "An
Inconvenient Truth," Leiserowitz said, those on the other end of
the political spectrum began to link Gore and Democrats not only
to climate-change policy, but also to
climate-change belief.

"They loathe Al Gore," Leiserowitz told LiveScience in August.
"Sometimes I joke that Al Gore could hold a press conference
tomorrow to say that science has determined that the Earth is
round and people out there would say, 'Well, no it isn't.'"